On CBS Thursday morning, a day after Congress passed a bill reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling, longtime “Face the Nation” anchor Bob Schieffer said President Obama emerged as the clear winner.

“The President won this thing,” Schieffer said. “There’s no question about that. But he has to be very careful not to rub [Republicans'] noses in it.”

Maybe I was thinking about that movie “Dumb and Dumber” but as I watched the disastrous rollout of Obamacare coming as it did on the heels of the Republican shutdown of the government, the phrase that kept running through my mind was “worse and worser.” Is worser a word? Well, actually, it is. We looked it up. The shutdown was the worst but this thing is worser. If we thought the partisan blather couldn’t get thicker or sillier than it got during the shutdown well, we now know. [That includes your own partisan blather, right Bob? -- Ed] By now, we have heard from all the people whose fault it wasn’t. We’ve heard all the talking points and some of the critics were all but foaming at the mouth. It was the Washington we have come to know. All talk, all the time, but at the end of the day just another example of how government seems incapable of making things better and it never seems to learn. Does anyone believe that successful start-ups like Amazon or Google would risk launching their programs before they were properly tested? There may be a lesson there if those involved could spend less time refining the talking points and more time actually trying to make things work. The way this thing is going it is a good thing we have a word like worser.

“Government seems incapable of making things better and it never seems to learn.”

Why yes, Bob. But at least half the country learned this lesson long before they reached the age of 76.

The Obama administration appears to have passed up offers from Amazon and Microsoft to help fix the federal government’s troubled healthcare enrollment website, according to documents released on Tuesday by a Republican-led congressional investigating committee.

An Oct. 7 inquiry from Amazon’s subsidiary Amazon Web Services Inc. was turned down by two senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing implementation of President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law, according to copies of emails provided by the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Microsoft also contacted HHS and the White House with offers of “technical expertise and assistance,” but the company has not provided any such services, a Microsoft representative said in an Oct. 25 letter to the committee. The letter did not say whether the administration had responded to Microsoft’s offers.

To bring this post full circle, what a difference a couple of weeks makes. In addition to a Website that’s a Kafkaesque nightmare, and with more and more Americans discovering that the president lied to them, and they’re losing their health insurance, including cancer patients reporting their coverage being dropped as a result of Obamacare, if only there was someone who knew such a calamity was about to ensue, and urged the president and his party not to roll Obamacare out in October.

Ted Cruz [made] a fight that the establishment shied away from. He took on a position for principle not popular with the media and public. He made that fight with lots of risks and little upside and pushed the media to the point where that media made absolutely sure that the entire country knew which party wanted to stop Obamacare and which party with one voice was dedicated to protecting Obamacare from repeal and or delay at all costs….

…right up until they weren’t.

Let me close with this: If Ted Cruz had not made this fight, when the Obamacare launch came and the problems arose, the media would have talked about how natural such problems were and when Democrats asked to delay implementation it would be sold by the media as not a big deal, the most reasonable thing in the world…

…instead of trying to explain why it’s necessary to delay a law passed by congress, signed by the president and upheld by the supreme court that they were united in defending as inviolate just two weeks ago while comedians across the country laugh at it.

GOP Ted Cruz did this for you, even while you were trying to destroy him.

My exit question for Karl Rove & Company: How many millions of dollars from Big money donors would you have paid to put Democrats up for election in 2014 in such a spot?

Indeed.™

Update: Ahh, this was the quote I was looking for when I wrote the above post, as spotted by Tim Blair, who writes:

Harvard professor and former Democrat adviser David Cutler explains why Barack Obama’s new healthcare program is such a brilliant, screaming, unfixable superdisaster:

They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business.

Huh. I can remember back in 2009, when it was just us crazy rightwing neocon deathbeast rethuglican libertarian types who were pointing out the shocking lack of real world business experience amongst Mr. Obama’s administration:

I think Obama’s Parade of Rookies a red herring. If you’re driving toward a brick wall, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re coasting in, or all ahead full-tilt boogie. You smack the wall, the Corvette’s modern art, and your name is not Rick Allen.

Like the accident involving the aforementioned drummer for Def Leppard, the wall has been thoroughly crashed (just like the Obamacare Website itself). After being driven on through the night, the Corvette went up in a pyromania of flames, and the high and dry left is now beset with a raging case of hysteria. And I’m not fa-fa-fa-foolin’.

(Sorry for that last paragraph. I realize it’s no rock of ages, but I couldn’t resist.)

Thank you Mr. Schieffer. But your line that "The shutdown was the worst but this thing is worser" is a little confusing to many readers. Let me metaphor it a bit for clarity --

The people who slowed this magnificent ship down with their lunatic screaming and foot stamping about these so-called "icebergs" was the worst! But it is starting to look like this minor scrape that seems to have appeared out of nowhere on the port bow might even be worser. Maybe.

But we expect to have all the problems fixed by 2:30am or so. As a matter of fact, by 3:00am this morning, that scrape won't even matter at all, we guarantee it.

And one way or another, we can be sure to get back to deservedly demonizing these fruitcake "icebergers" in short order.

I'll be interested to see how Ted Cruz's appearance on "The Tonight Show" this week (amazingly, promoted by NBC during Sunday Night Football) goes. Schieffer's commentary would have you think the Republicans shut down the government for some reason or another, but does its darnedest not to connect the shutdown with the fiasco that is ObamaCare.

Cruz will have his chance to make that point to a much bigger audience than on "Face the Nation", so it will be interesting to see if Leno allows him to make it without intermittent sniping Dave wouldn't, certain Jon Stewart would be fighting back as if his ideological life depended on it. But Leno's been far tougher in his monologue on Obama over the last year, and if he wants to irk his bosses at NBC even more, just letting Cruz talk to a few million people about the shutdown and ObamaCare is definitely one way to do it.

I've said this before, and I'll say it hereafter: Watching Cruz make a stand against funding ACA was like watching the Spartans making a stand against the Persians at Thermopylae. He wasn't going to win, and in and of itself it was a dubious gesture, but in the bigger picture it gave others time to build their coaltion to stop what was coming. Only thing was: The Greeks city-states rallied and stopped the Persians at the Battle of Salamis; the Republicans rallied and threw Cruz under the bus.